Daft Property - Irish Property News

Demolition the only way to build a better future... WITH THE building frenzy of the last decade and a half, who would have thought that we would be thinking of knocking some of it down again? But Brendan McDonagh, chief executive of Nama, probably got it right when he talked about the need to demolish some of the surplus stock in out-of-the-way locations. Everyone now knows that some of these estates will never be lived in, because they are not within easy commuting distance of jobs, or because there simply was never a market for them in the first place. It wasn’t just the bankers and the developers who got it wrong. The planners in the various local authorities have also made grave errors in allowing many of these estates to be developed in one horse towns and obscure villages. These developments – many of them large executive-style homes – simply did not make sense, even in buoyant times. Some of them are now an eyesore, and could disappear even faster than it took to build them. The...

7 Reasons Why Ireland Will Be Left Behind... IRELAND POST-RECESSION: As the first signs of economic recovery are seen in the US, Ireland faces a glut of problems that could see the country left behind while the rest of the developed world returns to fiscal prosperity. LAST JUNE when Ben Bernanke thought he spied some green shoots of recovery in the US economy, another American economist, Nouriel Roubini, referred to them as yellow weeds, while Warren Buffet claimed not to have seen anything, even though he had just had cataracts removed from his eyes. In recent weeks there is more reason for optimism in the US and most commentators would be of the view that the US economy may show some modest growth in 2010, though the unemployment rate might be slow to come down. Because America is a relatively closed economy the robust fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing were bound to pay dividends. American recessions usually don't last much longer than a year. Some recovery in the same time...

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft ...

We've never had it so bad, ESRI warns... Recession worst since the 1930s, think-tank reveals IRELAND is suffering the worst recession of any advanced country since the 1930s, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) warns in a grim analysis of the economy. Unemployment could rise above 500,000 as national income (GNP) is forecast to fall by 14pc over the three years from 2008 to 2010. The fall in national income beats the 11pc decline in the Finnish crisis of 1990 to 1993, when the collapse of the Soviet Union suddenly deprived Finland of its main market. The ESRI believes this year will be the worst of the crisis, with income per person plunging by more than 9pc in real terms. But there will be further decline next year, with a 1.2pc fall in national income. The stark outline comes as new figures will today show that the rate of increase in unemployment has slowed, but that 384,000 people are signing on. The CSO statistics reveal that an additional 11,000 signed on the li...

Spectre of gloom looms for those who keep their jobs as well as those laid off... GOING, GOING gone. Once these three words were the oft-repeated mantra of Ireland's busy auctioneers; now they form a gloomy synopsis of the state of the Irish jobs market. With no homes going under the hammer, the axe fell on jobs in the construction sector over the course of 2008. A decisive coinciding blow from the global economic crisis saw the reverberations spread through all sectors of the economy. Jobs are now being lost at such a fast rate that an Opposition leader (Labour Party's Eamon Gilmore) can call the soaring unemployment rate a "national crisis" and it doesn't sound like political hyperbole. Having started the year below 5 per cent, the estimated unemployment rate in November was 7.8 per cent. Economists now forecast that the rate will jump to double digits by the end of 2009. Almost 100,000 people joined the Live Register of unemployment benefit claimants in the fir...

Land values go up like a rocket and fall like a stone... SITE EVALUATION: Why would a developer bid €225,000 an acre in 1999 and €2.8m an acre in 2007? Bill Nowlan explains WHY HAS THE value of development land fallen so precipitously, by over 50 per cent in the past 12 months, when residential and other property values have only fallen by 25 per cent or 30 per cent? There is an old property cliché which says that "land values go up like a rocket and fall like a stone" and this seems to have been bourne out in Ireland over recent years. Why does this happen? To answer this question requires an insight into the way developers prepare their bids for development land and I set out below a glimpse into that process. Let me start by looking at how a developer in normal times estimates his bid for a plot of land with planning permission, which in estate agents' parlance is ready-to-go. The key starting point in a developers equations is the expected sale price of the finished b...

140,000 homeowners 'have fallen into negative equity'... Jim Power, chief economist with Friends First, said: "I reckon the majority of first-time buyers who bought into the market over the last three years are in negative equity." Analysing the gains made up to the peak of the housing boom, and the losses since, Mr Power said negative equity was affecting "at least 140,000 people and that's rising by the day". He warned that, in terms of the recession, "we haven't seen anything yet" and predicted the numbers in negative equity could reach 200,000 by the end of 2009. Latest Census figures show there were 570,000 residential mortgage holders in 2006, with tens of thousands of new mortgages taken out since. So the continuing decline in house prices means that one in three mortgage holders are likely find themselves trapped in a home worth less than the loan they took out to pay for it. With €125bn owed on Irish mortgages, homeowners facing r...

Building sector to lose 40,000 jobs next year... Many leaving to seek work in the Middle East. THE Irish economy is dead on its feet and as many as 40,000 construction workers could lose their jobs next year as housing starts have slumped to pre-1993 levels, according to latest figures obtained by the Sunday Independent. So bad are things here that a number of leading Irish building companies are leading an exodus of our most skilled and talented workers to foreign lands in the search for work. It has emerged that Irish firms are now lining up work in places like Dubai and Iran, both of which are experiencing building booms. In what is further bad news for the Irish economy, the number of housing completions this year will be just 45,000 compared to the 93,000 at its peak two years ago, and next year it is reckoned that the number of completions will be less than 20,000. This year, not one county in Ireland has managed to match or better the number of housing starts last year. In a sh...

The design of the first bridge across the border between the Republic and the North was revealed yesterday... The 280-metre-long cable-stayed bridge will link Narrow Water near Warrenpoint in Co Down with Cornamucklagh in Omeath, Co Louth, and has been designed so it is safe for cyclists and pedestrians. It is nearly 29 years since Narrow Water became synonymous with the single worst loss of life of British soldiers in the Troubles when two IRA bombs killed 18 soldiers. One civilian was also killed. The bridge has a tower at each end. The higher 100-metre-tall one is on the southern side, which will have the Cooley and Mourne mountains as a backdrop; while the lower tower at 30 metres will be on the northern end and will compliment the Drumlin topography there. Tony Dempsey, from consultant engineers Roughan O'Donovan, told councillors at meetings in Dundalk and Newry the criteria for selecting the bridge design included the impact on the environment and ecology as well as on the ...

The golden triangle – FF, the builders and the banks... Despite last week's bail-out, some of the country's most ambitious redevelopment plans are still in jeopardy... It was Fianna Fáil's best friend, Bob the Builder, who propelled the banks into the liquidity crisis and caused the historic post-midnight sitting of the Dáil. After a decade of swaggering around the corridors of power and inside the Fianna Fáil tent, many of those feted builders are now expected to put their most extravagant plans on ice and sit out the recession, cushioned by the citizens' guarantee to the financial institutions . "We're not so much talking about a golden circle as the golden triangle – Fianna Fáil, the builders and the banks," says Labour's Joan Burton. Irish banks are owed €110bn by the property and construction sector. It accounts for €60 of every €100 that residents have on deposit. As 28% of all borrowings, it is significantly greater than the 25% construction p...

The end of July reports show... Number signing on Live Register rises by 10,600 The rise in the number of people claiming unemployment benefits over the last year has increased at the fastest rate since records began over 40 years ago. In July, 10,600 people joined the Live Register bringing the seasonally adjusted total signing on to 226,000, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to figures released by the Central Statistics Office this morning. The monthly increase is the second highest on record after March of this year. The number on the register is the highest in a decade. Last month’s increase lifted the standardised unemployment rate to 5.9 per cent, the CSO said. Over the last 12 months the number of people seeking unemployment benefits has risen by over a third with 63,647 people joining the register. In July 6,700 males and 3,800 females joined the register. Leo Varadkar, Fine Gael enterprise spokesman accused the Government of losing control of a deteriorating economic...

House building crash helped spark sudden rise in jobless figures... HOUSE building crashed after the Christmas holidays last year, new CSO figures show -- helping to explain the sudden rise in unemployment during 2008. Output in house construction was at the lowest level since the current statistics began in 2000. It was also 20pc less than the previous low point eight years before. House building slumped more than l30pc on the previous quarter, as builders left sites closed after the New Year break. This left the volume of output down 38pc on the same period of 2007. The value of houses built was down 35pc, suggesting little change in prices over the 12 months. Non-residential building was up almost 9pc compared with 2007, and the value of the buildings was 14pc greater. This gain left total construction down almost 22pc on the previous year. But Rossa White, economist at Davy Research, said the figures seemed to be saying that non-house building was already slowing fast in 2007. ...

Ariel View of Dublin's Stephens Green: Story from www. ireland.com - Saturday, 26th April, 2008: " Plans for the Metro North line entail excavating a large section of St Stephen's Green at huge cost. But some are questioning the wisdom of using the Green as a transport hub, and worry that the work will forever alter the character of the park. Frank McDonald Environment Editor reports. On November 1st, 2005, at the Government's fanfare launch of its €34 billion Transport 21 investment programme, then minister for transport Martin Cullen announced that St Stephen's Green would become the capital's key transport hub. "It will be to Dublin what Grand Central is to New York," he said. A discreet veil was drawn over the environmental impact of this radical proposal, particularly on the much-loved park that was given to the people of Dublin in 1880 by Sir Arthur Edward Guinness, Lord Ardilaun, under an Act of Parliament entrusting its long-term care to the C...